2008-11-23

Reading the Internet

Disclaimer: What I read and my comments on them (as well as my posts on this blog) are not particularly interesting.

There are a number of websites that I like to read. Thanks to the advent of RSS and Atom feeds, I can subscribe to a feed of their latest posts and read them in a single location: an RSS Aggregator of some sort, like Google Reader. You may be reading my blog via such a medium yourself.

A very sad thing about such aggregators is that they usually do not preserve the pretty theme of the page from which the posts are coming from. I really enjoy the aesthetic I've designed for Kosmokaryote, but if you read it from Google Reader, your concept of Kosmokaryote is probably somewhat dissociated from the simple design I've laboured for so long on.

ANYWAY, the point of this post is to note that, for efficiency reasons, I now do all my Internet reading on Friday night/Saturday morning/Saturday afternoon. I usually have accumulated about 600 items to read and it takes several hours to go through them all. At the top of my blog (which you would not see via an RSS Reader!), there is a list of the last 6 items that I have read. At the bottom of the 6-item list is a Read More link which takes you to my actual Shared Items page of mine from Google Reader. It has the actual value, as it features the comments I sometimes put on the things I read. While the things I read might be insignificant to you, sometimes the comments might be :) I generally read technical and open source blogs, a linguistic and a psychology blog, webcomics, a professor at a small Christian college's blog, and some Green propaganda.

In the future, I think I will try to rig up something that takes the shared items and converts the comments into blog posts with a link to their original item. Since my comments are usually short, I'll probably aggregate them into single Weekend Reading entries that have a list of comments with their links. Mwahaha.

So, if you're interested in what I read or my comments on them; go forth. You may also subscribe to a feed of my shared items, and then avoid seeing the pretty theme I selected for the Shared Items page, boo hoo hoo